"His official association with the movement was in fact quite brief -- on arrival in Paris from his native Catalonia in 1929, the young Dalí was determined to join the Surrealists and was indeed eagerly welcomed by them as a new member; but by 1934 André Breton had ousted Dalí from the group in a humiliating public 'trial.' The two would continue sniping at each other well into old age. 'The only difference between me and a Surrealist is that I am a Surrealist,' Dalí famously said. But in 1927-1933 such distinctions were unnecessary -- even Breton admitted, 'For three or four years, Dalí would incarnate the Surrealist spirit and make it shine as brilliantly as ever' . . . Which makes it all the more surprising that Dalí's collected writings from this period have never before been translated into English. The volume Oui was first published in French in 1971, and elicited a reassessment of Dalí, who was by then infamous for his crass gestures toward notoriety and wealth ('Avida Dollars' was Breton's nasty anagram that stuck). Oui is a corrective to that caricature of the late Dalí, the bejeweled seeker of scandal; it presents us instead with the young, brilliant, and perhaps even sincere Dalí that first arrived in Paris to take it by storm. The short fictions, essays, and poems collected here document Dalí's love for his Spanish comrades, Luis Buñuel and Federico Garcia Lorca; his passion for the emerging arts of photography and cinema (including commentary on the landmark film he made with Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou); his Catalan roots and subsequent entry into the cosmopolitan world of the Parisian avant-garde; and key moments in the development of his 'Paranoid-Critical' method, the theoretical basis for Dalí's artwork throughout his life, which would ultimately draw the attention of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as well as Breton and his colleagues."